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Are there physics lessons to be learned from Texas A&M tragedy.



I was somewhat surprised to see in the video and still pictures from
the recent Texas A&M bonfire collapse that the logs that were being used to
construct the bonfire were stacked on their ends. My first impression was
that this was an inherently unstable configuration. Almost all the other
bonfire configurations I have seen stack the wood in a more stable
"cross-stack" configuration.

Does anyone have any information about the construction details,
particularly why logs were stacked on end for this bonfire?

Mark Shapiro
http://www.IrascibleProfessor.com